Democrats create an ALEC-killer

Chastened by the conservative movement’s startling success at using national money to dominate state legislatures, liberal activists this week will ask top donors to support a plan to reverse the precipitous Democratic decline in state governments, where the party was trounced yet again on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama’s former liaison to the states will launch a major new state-focused organization called the State Innovation Exchange — or SiX for short — before donors on Friday at the annual winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance liberal funding club.

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SiX’s goal is an ambitious one: to compete with a well-financed network of conservative groups — including the American Legislative Exchange Council — that for years have dominated state policy battles, advancing pro-business, anti-regulation bills in state after state.

SiX ultimately plans to raise as much as $10 million a year to boost progressive state lawmakers and their causes — partly by drafting model legislation in state capitols to increase environmental protections, expand voting rights, and raise the minimum wage — while also using bare-knuckle tactics like opposition research and video tracking to derail Republicans and their initiatives.

“Progressives are looking around to figure out where to go to push back, and there has not been a vehicle to do that at the state level — it’s the biggest missing piece in the progressive infrastructure,” said Nick Rathod, a career Democratic operative who started and will run SiX.

Rathod — who served as President Barack Obama’s liaison to state officials and directed state campaigns for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun safety group — has his work cut out for him.

After Tuesday’s elections, during which Republicans netted more than 300 seats, the GOP had full control of at least 29 state legislatures — its biggest edge since the 1920s.

Rathod’s supporters contend that Democrats, having essentially ceded state-level battles in recent years, are approaching a tipping point. If they don’t mount an effective and well-funded response soon, liberals fear Republicans could use their state-level supremacy to severely damage the political clout of Democrats and some of their key constituencies, including organized labor and African-Americans.

Such state policy fights likely will help shape the agenda of the 2016 presidential election, as they did in 2008 and 2012, and, perhaps more importantly, the redrawing of congressional district boundaries after the 2020 census.

The national political parties have increasingly targeted the once-a-decade redistricting process as a chance to fundamentally shape the balance of power in Washington for at least the next decade. Democrats got clobbered in the 2010 redistricting, which Rathod called “a wake-up call to progressives that legislatures matter, not only in state policymaking but inevitably at the federal level. We effectively gave away the House of Representatives for a decade.”

Conservatives and their groups, including ALEC, deserve credit, conceded Paul Booth, an official at American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “They made a sound strategic decision to prioritize activity at the state level and they beat us to the punch. They were smarter than we were,” said Booth, who has been working with Rathod to help launch SiX.

Rathod spent the summer traveling the country quietly holding meetings with state lawmakers, union officials and rich donors,using a PowerPoint presentation to illustrate the spread of GOP control and conservative legislation across the country. He appears to have won support from some influential and deep-pocketed liberals, but a receptive audience from the Democracy Alliance this week would go a long way toward determining whether the group can meet its ambitious goals.

The Democracy Alliance’s member donors in the past decade have given more than $500 million to club-recommended groups. And SiX appears to be on track to score a coveted endorsement, depending on how it’s received at this week’s annual winter meeting, which starts Wednesday and lasts four days — with most of the proceedings held behind closed doors at Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.

In an email sent on Friday to confirmed attendees, Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche wrote that, though the four-day confab will be held in Washington, “it is the rest of the country — the states where progressive power must be built and restored — that will be our primary and urgent focus.”

LaMarche, who assumed the reins of the Democracy Alliance last year, conceded in an interview that the group and major liberal donors more generally haven’t always prioritized the states, instead focusing disproportionately on higher-profile national politics.

“There is not a lot of history of donors stepping up to give to state legislative races in places that they don’t have a connection to,” he said. “And in order to get this job done over the next five or six years, there has to be in effect a nationalization of the state strategy.”

The liberal disadvantage isn’t just on the policy side.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, which invests in key state races and is considered a major player in a national network of deep-pocketed groups conceived by uber-operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, raised $26 million in 2014 . That compares to $9 million raised by its Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which has sometimes struggled to win support from national donors.